It's the Marxism, Stupid!

Some idiots in the media are tying Donald Trump to Venezuela dictator Chavez, because both have (had) bombastic personalities.


Texan 99 posts at Grim's Hall,

As Venezuela enters its end-game, the news reports seem strangely unable to diagnose its problem. Could it be, for instance, that the country's destruction resulted from electing leaders with the wrong personality? That didn't help, I'm sure, but as this author points out,
"Look, I’m as scared of a Trump presidency as any reasonably sane center-right pro-democracy millennial. But Trump is not surrounded by a loony team of Marxist advisors hellbent on destroying the economy for the sake of denying that there is such a thing as a market."

In the meantime, I'm still not sure what the final cataclysm will look like, but Venezuelans already are beginning to eat their cats, dogs, pigeons, and zoo animals--those that haven't starved first.

Melting pot?

On Facebook Lenina Close posts,

I had the most interesting dream last night. I was staying at my beloved Abbey (St. Walburga in Northern Colorado) and my friend Tom Krannawitter came to visit me to discuss the recent violent events in the nation and the subject of race. I told him that I could no longer teach my students that America was the glorious "melting pot" the founders intended. It seemed to me that we had become no better than yesterday's "dirty laundry," where the colors must be separated or there would be "bleeding." I explained that the exception was sometimes in cold, the colors could be mixed without "bleeding" but never in hot. Further, that skin color was as insignificant to one's character as the clothing one wears but until we evolve past the idea of "race" that we would never be any better than yesterday's dirty laundry. (I'm tagging a few friends and students for discussion) Feedback? Analysis?

Another son to be proud of

Free range chickens. Over one thousand of them.



I couldn't figure out how to upload these photos to my blog. So I woke up that kid who loves to browse social media on his phone.

Within a few minutes Greg figured it out and did his best to explain to me how I could do it myself next time. We'll see.

A son to be proud of

Sometimes people forget to close gates completely. Horses get out. Someone calls Jon. Before you know it, all the horses are safely back behind the gate, and headed back to pasture.

The nicest thing anyone has ever done for me in my entire life.

Farm. Trying to sleep. Flies. The kind that like nostrils, ears, and lips. Wasps. Seven nests in my room.

A knock on my door, shortly after sunrise. It's my son Jon. He used to have this room. He knows. He's carrying a wasp-killer can. He sprays seven wasp nests. No more wasps.

He duct-tapes the screen to my door. No more flies.

If Trump wins, will America be a safer place for gays?

V the K writes at Gay Patriot,

Donald Trump actually says a lot of things I agree with. Then again, Marco Rubio also said a lot of things I agreed with. It’s the actions of a politician, not their words, that determine if I will support them. But I digress. The point is, Donald Trump’s position on immigration is far more gay-friendly than Hillary’s is. Hillary and the Democrat party are hellbent in importing as many Mohammedans as possible into the USA. (Because, you know, we have a severe problem with not enough people to fill the millions and millions of jobs the awesome Obama economy has generated; and also, the Government has so much surplus money to spend on welfare for the new arrivals. It’s a sarcastic win-win.) Among the millions of Mohammedans Hillary Barack Clinton will import will doubtless be a number of Tamerlan Tsaernevs, Tashfeen Malik’s, and Omar Mateens. Hillary doesn’t worry about this, because she will have Secret Service protection; terrorism is for the little people.

Read more here.

Liberating things about having faith in God

At One Cosmos, Gagdad Bob writes,

Ultimately we might say that faith is the answer to the problem of God, just as scientific faith is the answer to the problem of dealing with physical reality. This is one reason why science developed only in the Christian west and nowhere else: our faith in a rational creator.

Faith is "knowledge of an approaching discovery." To bring it down to bobworld, I approach each post with an attitude of faith that one will appear. They are very much structured by an attitude of open not-knowing, such that I am guided by what it is I am looking for. It very much feels as if there is an invisible attractor out there, and as soon as it starts tugging at me, it attracts the right ideas and books and other resources to fill it out.

...Notice that this is one of the functions of the liberal media, albeit in reverse. That is, they work furiously to "inform" (unform?) us what not to pay attention to, such as Benghazi, or the Clinton Foundation, or what actually happens during an abortion, or what happens when you raise the minimum wage, or the risk factors of homosexuality, or the science of human intelligence. Liberals literally have no faith, in that they cannot permit themselves to ask questions about these and countless other subjects.

Commenter Julie adds,

One of the liberating things about having faith in God is knowing that there is no reason to fear truth, scientific or otherwise, because nothing that is true can negate God. Science grounded in truth (as opposed to propaganda) is simply further evidence of God.

Conversely, anyone rooted in leftist faith must guard vigilantly against the hatefacts of life, because to acknowledge them is to acknowledge that they are living the lie.

...With my kids, I often talk about the presence of God as being like the air: nobody has ever seen air, but we know it exists because of how it moves other things. Another good analogy we used this weekend is radio waves, wifi or Bluetooth. These things are not visible, and without the equipment to detect the signal they may as well be nonexistent. They can't be seen, heard, touched, tasted or smelled. Nevertheless, here we are, sending invisible messages to each other using those very unseen wavelengths, and they have a profound effect upon the everyday lives of modern humans.

Read more here.

Don't let Hillary's owners play with matches!

Fred Reed writes,

A good reason to vote for Trump, a very good reason whatever his other intentions, is that he does not want a war with Russia. Hillary and her elite ventriloquists threaten just that. Note the anti-Russian hysteria coming from her and her remoras.

Such a war would be yet another example of the utter control of America by rich insiders. No normal American has anything at all to gain by such a war. And no normal American has the slightest influence over whether such a war takes place, except by voting for Trump. The military has become entirely the plaything of unaccountable elites.

...Letting dilettantes, grifters, con men, pasty Neocons, bottle-blonde ruins, and corporations decide on war is insane. We have pseudo-masculine dwarves playing with things they do not understand. So far as I am aware, none of these fern-bar Clausewitzes has worn boots, been in a war, seen a war, or faces any chance of being in a war started by themselves. They brought us Iraq, Afghanistan, and Isis, and can’t win wars against goatherds with AKs. They are going to fight…Russia?

...When Washington pushed the South into the Civil War, it expected a conflict that might be over in twenty-four hours, not four years with as least 650,000 dead. When Germany began WWI, it expected a swift lunge into Paris, not four years of hideously bloody static war followed by unconditional surrender. When the Japanese Army pushed for attacking Pearl, it did not foresee GIs marching in Tokyo and a couple of cities glowing at night. When Hitler invaded Poland, utter defeat and occupation of Germany was not among his war aims. When the US invaded Vietnam, it did not expect to be outfought and outsmarted by a bush-world country. When Russia invaded Afghanistan it did not expect…nor when America invaded Afghanistan, nor when it attacked Iraq, nor….

Is there a pattern here?

The standard American approach to war is to underestimate the enemy, overestimate American capacities, and misunderstand the kind of war it enters. This is particularly true when the war is a manhood ritual for masculine inadequates–think Kristol, Podhoretz, Sanders, the whole Neocon milk bar, and that mendacious wreck, Hillary, who has the military grasp of a Shetland pony. If you don’t think weak egos and perpetual adolescence have a part in deciding policy, read up on Kaiser Wilhelm.

Now, if Washington accidentally or otherwise provoked a war with Russia in, say, the Baltics or the Ukraine, and actually used its own forces, where might this lead, given the Pentagon’s customary delusional optimism? A very serious possibility is a humiliating American defeat. The US has not faced a real enemy in a long time. In that time the armed forces have been feminized and social-justice warriorified, with countless officials having been appointed by Obama for reasons of race and sex. Training has been watered down to benefit girl soldiers, physical standards lowered, and the ranks of general officers filled with perfumed political princes. Russia is right there at the Baltic borders: location, location, location. Somebody said, “Amateurs think strategy, professionals think logistics.” Uh-huh. The Russians are not pansies and they are not primitive.

...The same danger exists incidentally with regard to a war with China in the South China Sea. The American Navy hasn’t fought a war in seventy years. It doesn’t know how well its armament works. The Chinese, who are not fools, have invested in weaponry specifically designed to defeat carrier battle groups. A carrier in smoking ruins would force Washington to start a wider war to save face, with unpredictable results. Can you name one American, other than the elites, who has anything to gain from war with China?

What has any normal American, as distinct from the elites and various lobbies, gained from any of our wars post Nine-Eleven? Hillary and her Neocon pack have backed all of them.

I note, pointlessly, that probably none of America’s recent martial catastrophes would have occurred if we still had constitutional government. How many congressmen do you think would vote for a declaration of war if they had to tell their voters that they had just launched, for no reason of importance to Americans, an attack on the homeland of a nuclear power?

There are lots of reasons not to vote for Clinton and the suppurating corruption she represents. Not letting her owners play with matches rates high among them.

Not looking good

Go here to see how the statisticians at Five Thirty Eight view the state of the presidential election. It is not looking good.

Hillary's "On Hold" Secretary of State message

Mixing politics and business out of public view

The New Yok Times, in its never-ending quest to convince us to elect Hillary Clinton, publishes a piece today showing how Paul Manafort mixed business and politics when he was an adviser to Ukrainian president Viktor F. Yanukovych.

Hand-written ledgers show $12.7 million in cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from the pro-Russian political party of Viktor F. Yanukovych. Mr. Manafort did not receive “any such cash payments,” his lawyer said.
Read more here.

Listening and communicating in intimate relationships

Maria Popova writes at Brain Pickings,

“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her masterful meditation on the magic of real human conversation. “They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” But in moments of pain or anger, when words spring from the rawest recesses of the heart, they can amplify our deepest insecurities and emotional vulnerabilities, in turn fueling a maelstrom of mutual misunderstanding.

How to avoid that is what Alain de Botton explores in a portion of The Course of Love (public library) — the immeasurably insightful psychological novel that gave us De Botton on vulnerability and the paradox of why we sulk.

De Botton writes:

What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination.

Fertile communication, in other words, is largely a matter of what Anna Deavere Smith called refusing to “use language as a mask” — refusing to hide from both the other person and from oneself in the act of communication. This skill is no different from the vast majority of our psychoemotional arsenal, which is shaped by our early caretakers, and is contingent upon the degree to which our parents have managed to unconditionally accept us and nurture our inner wholeness. De Botton writes:

As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes — for a while, at least — be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an invaluable wellspring of courage from which those children would eventually be able to draw to sustain the confessions and direct conversations of adult life.

Echoing Hemingway’s assertion that “most people never listen,” De Botton adds:

Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key — a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they’ve been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place.

Paradoxically, De Botton argues, being frequently unsettled by communication with our loved ones is precisely what attests to the fullness and strength of those bonds, and to their orientation toward mutual growth:

It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other’s imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes — hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more.

Read more here.

She will finish the job!

What values beat in the heart of the West today?

Roosh writes at Return of Kings,

What about traditional marriage between a man and a woman? Please, we know the answer to that one.http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/american_studies/a_peoples_cube_classic_wo.php
What about patriarchal gender roles based on masculinity and femininity? You know, husband and wife, father and mother? Provide and protect, home and hearth? The family as the foundational unit of a just, peaceful and happy society?

ROK and our community of traditional, masculine and proudly heterosexual men, now being threatened with banishment from the whole of the EU, answers that question. Do I need to even say one word about the current status of democracy and its institutions in the West?

What the West is feeling is not simply anger and fear, but sadness and grief at a loss of culture, of values and of traditions that we in the West have allowed to let go. We have no one to blame but ourselves for this loss. Muslims and Islam are simply a reminder of what we once were—proud, distinct and morally grounded in a belief in God, truth and justice.

If The West and Europe is paralyzed in it’s response to Islam and Muslims, it is because we no longer have a cohesive value system that anyone wants to rally around and defend.

,,,The threat of Islam is also an opportunity for the West to once again define itself. What values beat in the heart of the West today? What do Western hearts ache to express and believe in? About man? About life? About our purpose and reason for existence?

A Peoples Cube Classic

h/t American Digest

Two lives forged into one

Judianna writes

All the Little Things That Define Marriage
A pat on the backside. A quick hug in the hallway.

The Morse codes of romance that you learn after you’ve survived the ritual mating dance.

Once you’ve spent the requisite time waiting for the other shoe to drop and then figuring out that it’s never going to, you settle into a comfort zone with your mate. Sure, the initial wild excitement and the giddy romance are nice, but they can’t hold a candle to the sweet assurance of love that has lasted for years.

Sly winks to each other. Turning up the radio for a special song. An arm slipped around your waist while you’re cooking spaghetti.

These little things are what define a marriage. They’re the merit badges earned after you’ve passed the “now-I-know-all-about-you-but-I-love-you anyway” test.

Read more here.

The missing page

Remember that pledge on Hillary's website that all rape victims are to be believed? No longer on the website!

Daniel Halper reports at The New York Post,

The Clinton campaign has removed a pledge from its website stating that all survivors of sexual assault “have the right to be believed.”

...The website says the scrubbing came after the election-cycle re-emergence of Juanita Broaddrick, who has accused Bill Clinton of raping her in 1978 when he was attorney general of Arkansas.

Broaddrick has accused Hillary Clinton of enabling her husband — and of threatening her to keep her allegations against Bill Clinton silent.

“It’s important for everyone to know that Hillary Clinton is not innocent in all of the coverup and the attempted attacks on all of the women that Bill Clinton abused,” Broaddrick told Boston radio station WRKO.

Read more here.

Taking progressives for granted

Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times,

All these woebegone Republicans whining that they can’t rally behind their flawed candidate is crazy. The G.O.P. angst, the gnashing and wailing and searching for last-minute substitutes and exit strategies, is getting old.

They already have a 1-percenter who will be totally fine in the Oval Office, someone they can trust to help Wall Street, boost the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, cuddle with hedge funds, secure the trade deals beloved by corporate America, seek guidance from Henry Kissinger and hawk it up — unleashing hell on Syria and heaven knows where else.

The Republicans have their candidate: It’s Hillary.

...Hillary will keep the establishment safe. Who is more of an establishment figure, after all? Her husband was president, and he repealed Glass-Steagall, signed the Defense of Marriage Act and got rid of those pesky welfare queens.

Hillary is a reliable creature of Wall Street. Her tax return showed the Clintons made $10.6 million last year, and like other superrich families, they incorporated with the Clinton Executive Services Corporation (which was billed for the infamous server). Trump has started holding up goofy charts at rallies showing Hillary has gotten $48,500,000 in contributions from hedge funders, compared to his $19,000.

Robert Kagan, a former Reagan State Department aide, adviser to the McCain and Mitt Romney campaigns and Iraq war booster, headlined a Hillary fund-raiser this summer. Another neocon, James Kirchick, keened in The Daily Beast, “Hillary Clinton is the one person standing between America and the abyss.”

She has finally stirred up some emotion in women, even if it is just moderate suburban Republican women palpitating to leave their own nominee, who has the retro air of a guy who just left the dim recesses of a Playboy bunny club.

The Democratic nominee put out an ad featuring Trump-bashing Michael Hayden, an N.S.A. and C.I.A. chief under W. who was deemed “incongruent” by the Senate when he testified about torture methods. And she earned an endorsement from John Negroponte, a Reagan hand linked to American-trained death squads in Latin America.

Politico reports that the Clinton team sent out feelers to see if Kissinger, the Voldemort of Vietnam, and Condi Rice, the conjurer of Saddam’s apocalyptic mushroom cloud, would back Hillary.

Hillary has written that Kissinger is an “idealistic” friend whose counsel she valued as secretary of state, drawing a rebuke from Bernie Sanders during the primaries: “I’m proud to say Henry Kissinger is not my friend.”

The Hillary team seems giddy over its windfall of Republicans and neocons running from the Trump sharknado. But as David Weigel wrote in The Washington Post, the specter of Kissinger, the man who advised Nixon to prolong the Vietnam War to help with his re-election, fed a perception that “the Democratic nominee has returned to her old, hawkish ways and is again taking progressives for granted.”

...As Republican strategist Steve Schmidt noted on MSNBC, “the candidate in the race most like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from a foreign policy perspective is in fact Hillary Clinton, not the Republican nominee.”

Read more here.

Christians and Pharisees

James Patrick Riley observes,

When you finally come to the conclusion there is a God, you’re likely to try to attempt to please Him.

And this is where it can get dangerous. You might be on your way to the sanctuary for worship, and you see a man curled up by the side of the road, bloody and beaten by robbers. Something tells you the man needs your help (that’s God talking to you), but you are wearing your Sunday best, and you’re not trained as a first responder, and you’ve been given the honor of opening today’s meeting in prayer, and, besides, this guy is probably a drug addict and you have little children you’re responsible for — so you hurry on to church and you prove that you have the spirit of the Pharisee — that weird inclination to ignore what Jesus called “the weightier matters of the law.”

The #NeverTrump movement is defined by this Pharisee spirit. It is chock full of it. Texas pastor Max Lucado is a great example. Max leads what he calls a “red state” church, but Max has a maxim: ”I don’t want anybody to know how I vote.” Max does this to make sure the Democratic voters in his church, the ones who support abortion on demand, Islamo-pandering, and class warfare are not made to feel uncomfortable. However, Max recently broke his neutrality pledge when Donald Trump called a bimbo a bimbo. According to Max:

I would not have said anything about Mr. Trump, never — I would never have said anything if he didn’t call himself a Christian. It’d be none of my business whatsoever to make any comments about his language, his vulgarities, his slander of people, but I was deeply troubled … that here’s a man who holds up a Bible one day, and calls a lady “bimbo” the next.

Think on that for a moment. Max closes his eyes to another “Christian,” Barack Obama, who stands foursquare for the slaughter of millions of unborn babies, at your expense, but Donald Trump called a lady a “bimbo?” Intolerable! Unthinkable! Impolite! Time to engage the Pharisee warp engines.

Donald is a blunt customer, but it looks like he does have a heart. When asked about abortion, Trump related a story close to home. He said that he knew of a pregnancy that was going to be terminated. ”That child today,” Donald continued, ”is a total superstar. It is a great great child.”

When Donald Trump picked the most pro-life running mate in history to be his partner in the quest for the presidency, Governor Mike Pence, he backed up that claim. He made good on his conversion to the life issue, and, in so doing, he proved to be the opposite of the Pharisee spirit — a man who cares about the “weightier matters of the law.” Max Lucado may value political fence-sitting in church, a pleasant smile, and a polite manners, but Donald Trump risked the wrath of a baby-killing culture, and even repudiated his own past, by embracing the politics of life.

Who is the real Christian here? The one who acts like it, or the one who puts on a polite show of neutrality?

Another of my Pharisee correspondents on Facebook wrote this about Donald Trump:

“If you are unconvinced that a foul mouthed, arrogant, strip club and casino owning, philanderer who boasts about being able to shoot people in the streets without losing voters, is immoral then I’m not really sure where to go with this conversation.”

Yet another invoked scripture in his rejection of Trump:

“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”I’ve been around church people all of my life. Even at Stanford, where humanism was the prevailing denomination, I can tell you the religious spirit — whether it is lamenting “gambling” or shaming someone who didn’t recycle his bottle of Pepsi — brings out the worst side of human nature, and it brings ignorance into high relief.

Let’s take a few of these, one by one, starting with wagering. The Bible, folks, doesn’t say much about gambling. Our pious ancestors in New England used lotteries to build churches. If your only objection to Donald Trump rests in casino ownership, you really would feel right at home with the Christ-killing band because you have imbibed legalism as doctrine.

Foul mouthed? I’m guessing you haven’t read scripture with any real scrutiny, because when God gets angry, He doesn’t hold back. His prophets call harlots harlots. His Son called religious hypocrites, “white washed tombs full of dead men’s bones.” “Vipers.” ”Sons of the Devil.” But even if you value a polite tongue, and that’s your virtue, don’t begin comparing that virtue to being courageous in the face of Islamic jihad. I will take a foul mouth defender of life over a church-sitting coward any day.

Arrogant? I always get a kick out of people who spend all day in some corner of the bureaucracy, who never need to make a sale, who never need to appear confident, because they get paid every day, whether they do anything useful or not. Donald has to convince people a skyscraper is worth building, folks. You are mistaking confidence, faith even, for arrogance, because you’ve never had to really make a sale. Try it sometime, and see if you can do it without boosting your confidence and risking looking a little “arrogant.”

Strip clubs and philandering. I won’t make any defense for that, but I would ask you to look to yourselves. Do you buy television cable services from a company that also offers pornography? Do you stay in hotels with adult content on their television screens? Is your stock portfolio scrubbed clean of anyone who profits from soft porn? What’s in your wallet and where are you spending it? The press has been watching Donald pretty closely now for 18 months. Have you seen any philandering stories? I haven’t.

And I would ask you to look to your Bibles again. God uses some pretty gritty characters to work His glorious and sovereign will. Jacob was a trickster who lied to his father. Abraham had wives and concubines. Samson kept a harlot. Solomon had hundreds of concubines. Peter betrayed Christ. Saul of Tarsus, was a murderous wretch.

You actually know all about that, but when you see a flawed man, in the flesh, you act just like a stoning torch mob, and you won’t even admit it.

Jesus knew all about this dismissive, self-righteous character of ours. He knew our nature. He knew there’s a Pharisee spirit in us that takes pride in being faithful to our wives, even as our horn-dog spirit wrestles with Donald Trump’s beauty pageants. Are we righteous, or just jealous? When the harlot adorns Jesus’ feet with precious ointment, are we accusing or praising God for forgiveness?

Donald Trump is more righteous than you think. He wants to protect you from Islamic zealots. He wants to protect your right to defend your families with firearms. He even wants to exempt your pulpits from IRS tyranny. He wants to end the death tax, so you can pass on your farms and your family business to your children. He wants to lower your taxes. He wants to protect the lives of unborn children and appoint Constitutional judges.

Read more here:
h/t Gini McGrath

1100 jobs lost in Western Colorado

Colorado state GOP chair Steve House reminds us of another reason to vote for Trump:

The miners have a specific message for Mr. Trump. They know that Hillary will kill mining as she has publicly stated. 1100 jobs lost in the past 3 years in western Colorado alone where families lost their $134,000 income producing the cleanest coal in America. We burn dirty coal while families and communities suffer which helps our environment how? When you vote remember that the livelihoods of many more miners and people who work in Oil and Gas are at stake. There is work to be done at the state and federal level to insure that we move forward with our greatest assets for immediate economic development so vote the ticket to insure these hard working families can take care of themselves as better strategies are put in place.

George Soros gets hacked

Have you heard? Matt Palumbo writes at AllenbWest.com,

Now, the Democrat establishment’s biggest donor has found himself hacked. As the Daily Caller reports: Hundreds of internal documents from groups run by prominent billionaire liberal donor George Soros were leaked online Saturday after hackers infiltrated the groups.

The 2,576 files were released by DCLeaks, a website which claims to be “launched by the American hacktivists who respect and appreciate freedom of speech, human rights and government of the people.”

The documents are from multiple departments of Soros’ organizations. Soros’ the Open Society Foundations seems to be the group with the most documents in the leak. Files come from sections representing almost all geographical regions in the world, “the President’s Office”, and something named SOUK.

There are documents dating from at least 2008 to 2016. In June, the Open Society Foundations also had several documents leaked by DCLeaks. Bloomberg reported that the foundation notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the hacking.

DCLeaks has been alleged to be a Russian-backed source.

As Zero Hedge adds: An email leaked by WikiLeaks earlier this week showed Soros had advised Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State on how to handle unrest in Albania – advice she acted on.
Another Twitter user who went through some of the leaked documents compiled a list of Soros-linked NGOs that conspired to manipulate elections in the EU.

. @sn0wba111 @CapuPatriote Full list of Soros NGOs manipulating elections in all EU member states. #SorosLeak #Soros https://t.co/h5qWX6eZCi

— ⚓ Cain Raiser (@ActaNonVerba_) August 14, 2016
And that’s not all:
Somebody hacked Soros. His critics will be busy today. This doc alone shows Soros's anti-Israel network | https://t.co/xZ9TFslK0o
— Mike Doran (@Doranimated) August 14, 2016

Mocking Catholics

Have you heard about the "black mass" Satanists plan to conduct on August 15 in Oklahoma City? Dan Bergin reports for ICN,

Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City has called the faithful to prayer as a Satanist group prepares to conduct a 'Black Mass' at the city's Civic Center later today (August 15).

The ceremony, deliberately timed for the Feast of the Assumption, (celebrated on Monday in the US) will reportedly include insults to the Virgin Mary as well as mockery of the Catholic liturgy. The ceremony will be led by Dastur Adams Daniels, a registered sex offender who says that he is "doing the Devil's work."

In a report by the Catholic News Agency, Archbishop Coakley urged Christians to gather at a Unity Prayer Service and Walk on August 15 at 6pm. The event will begin at the Jesus Wept Statue of Saint Joseph's Old Cathedral and end at the United Methodist First Church for a Christian prayer service.

"In response to this blasphemous event, and the many other acts of hatred and violence happening in our world in recent weeks, I am encouraging the faithful and people of good will to pray together for healing and peace, and for the Lord to watch over our community and protect us from evil and its many destructive and violent manifestations," Coakley told CNA.

"I also ask that we pray for the conversion of this man and for all who have not yet come to know the Lord of Life," the Archbishop added.

Cardinal Raymond Burke has also expressed his sadness and shock at the news. He will be celebrating a special Mass for the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and encourages the faithful to pray the Rosary on the day.

A petition to the City authorities calling for the event to be cancelled has raised more than 110,000 signatures.

The first morning

When I got up this morning, these horses were the first thing I saw.

Then I turned a lttle to my left and saw the rows of zucchini, butternut and pin pan squash.

That last squash is not one I was familiar with. This is what a pin pan squash looks like when ready to eat.

I went downstairs and turned the corner, and there was a mama cow and her baby.

I walked out to get a closer look at the plants, and there was what I needed to start my day. Seven varieties of lettuce perfect for a mixed salad.

I turned and there was Shamus, waiting for me to throw a small rock, so he could chase after it.

Shamus is the daddy of eight newborn puppies, with whom I am sharing a room. I'll have pictures of them soon.

We made it safely to New Mexico

We are getting our daily afternoon monsoon here in the mountains of New Mexico, so I will sit down for a few minutes and blog. Yesterday we made the move here from Colorado. We left in late-afternoon, and we got to enjoy the Colorado sunset all the way down I-25 to the New Mexico state line. As the sun lowered in the sky, afternoon showers tried unsuccessfully to block out the sun. So we enjoyed golden yellow, then Denver Broncos orange, then Colorado Rockies purple, all behind a curtain of late afternoon showers.

Colleen, Kim, Jon and Sara went first, in their rental car with their new Burnese Mountain Dog puppy, which is about as cute as a puppy can get. I followed their car, and was sandwiched in between them and Thomas and Greg pulling a trailer behind the Ford pickup. After we got into New Mexico Jon joined me and drove my car. He needs the hours of parentally supervised driving to get his New Mexico license this fall. He has been working at Walmart in Colorado this summer to try to earn enough money to buy a used jeep or pickup truck.

The ranch is located in the mountains east of Santa Fe. Six or seven miles of the road are dirt, which, of course turns to mud on an afternoon like this; hence Jon's need for an all wheel drive vehicle. I'll be including more photos with my blog, much as I did when I started this blog over a decade ago.

The wisdom of the heart

Maria Popova writes in brainpickings,

The wisdom of the heart that we reap in that vulnerable state is of a wholly different order than the intellectual insight we synthesize through deliberate rational thought...

In The Captive & The Fugitive (public library), the fifth volume of his masterwork In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871–November 18, 1922) shines a penetrating sidewise gleam on this paradox of how the intellect, in its coolly rational search for facts, blinds us to the larger truths of our emotional reality.

Shortly after the protagonist has completed a rigorous intellectual analysis of his feelings for his romantic partner, Albertine, and concluded that he no longer loves her, he receives news of her death. He is suddenly overcome by such uncontainable and uncontrollable sorrow that the truth — a truth his intellect had rejected but his heart encoded far more deeply — was revealed to him: He does, after all, love Albertine tremendously.

Maria recommends that the Proust piece should be

Complemented with philosopher Martha Nussbaum on the intelligence of the emotions, British economic theorist and philosopher E.F Schumacher on seeing with the eye of the heart, and Alain de Botton on what Proust can teach us about living more fully.

Read more here.

Staying tuned in and emotionally connected

I have two teenage sons and a daughter who will turn 13 in November. Tomorrow I am going to move in with them on their mother's farm/ranch in New Mexico.

Sue Shellenbarger writes in the Wall Street Journal,

Once seen as a time for parents to step back, adolescence is increasingly viewed as an opportunity to stay tuned in and emotionally connected. The research makes it possible to identify four important phases in the development of intellectual, social and emotional skills that most teens will experience at certain ages. Here is a guide to the latest findings:

Ages 11 to 12
As puberty takes center stage, tweens can actually slip backward in some basic skills...Coaching tweens in organizational skills can help.
...Parents can help foster sound decision-making, thinking through pros and cons and considering other viewpoints.
...By remaining warm and supportive, parents may be able to influence the way their teen’s brain develops at this stage.

Ages 13 to 14
Parents should brace themselves for what is often a wildly emotional passage...
...At about this time, teens’ response to stress goes haywire, sparking more door-slamming and tears...
Parts of the brain most vulnerable to stress are still maturing, so coping strategies teens use at this stage can become ingrained in the brain’s circuitry as lifelong patterns, according to a 2016 research review in Developmental Science Review. Psychologists advise teaching and modeling self-soothing skills, such as meditation, exercise or listening to music.

Coach teens on friendship skills, including how to read their peers’ expressions and body language. Encourage them to choose friends based on shared interests, not popularity, and to dump friends who are unkind. Teach them how to repair friendships after a fight by apologizing, making amends or compromising.

Family support is a stress buffer. Teens whose families provide companionship, problem-solving and emotional support are less likely to become depressed after exposure to severe stress, according to a 2016 study of 362 Israeli adolescents in the Journal of Family Psychology.

Ages 15 to 16
Teens’ appetite for risk-taking peaks at this age...
It is not too late for warm, supportive parents to make a difference. In a laboratory risk-taking test, teens who grew closer to their parents starting at age 15 showed less activation of a brain region linked to risk-taking and took fewer chances 18 months later, according to a 2015 study of 23 adolescents published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. The closeness to parents included having parents’ respect and help talking through problems, and an absence of arguing or yelling, according to the study, in which Dr. Telzer was a co-author.

Normal fears of danger are temporarily suppressed during adolescence, a shift scientists believe is rooted in an evolutionary need to leave home and explore new habitats. Studies have found adolescents fail to change their appraisal of risky situations even after being warned that the hazards are greater than they expect.

The ability to make and keep good friends is especially useful at this stage. Teens with friends they trust and count on for support are less likely to engage in risky behavior such as shoplifting, riding with a dangerous driver or having unprotected sex...

It is not too late for warm, supportive parents to make a difference. In a laboratory risk-taking test, teens who grew closer to their parents starting at age 15 showed less activation of a brain region linked to risk-taking and took fewer chances 18 months later, according to a 2015 study of 23 adolescents published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. The closeness to parents included having parents’ respect and help talking through problems, and an absence of arguing or yelling,...

Ages 17 to 18
Benefits of the teenage brain’s ability to change and develop are evident at this stage.
Read more here.

Punished for expressing her faith

The Becket Fund reports,

The military’s highest court ruled yesterday that men and women serving in the U.S. Armed Forces can be punished for exercising their religion if judges deem the practice not religiously “important.” The ruling upholds the government’s criminal prosecution of a U.S. Marine for refusing to discard personal notes that had Bible verses on them. The case may now be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 2014, Marine Lance Corporal Monifa Sterling was ordered to remove from her workstation three pieces of paper with a paraphrase from the Book of Isaiah, “No weapon formed against me shall prosper,” even though co-workers were permitted to keep nonreligious messages on their desks. She declined and was court-martialed. A lower court upheld Sterling’s court martial, rejecting her argument that her faith was protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Read more here.

Globalist elites

Both Ace of Spades and Peggy Noonan write today about how out-of-touch the globalist elites are from the rest of us. Ace writes,

I mean, sure, Hillary's promising her corporate clients she'll import replacement workers for these unreasonable Americans, too, but at least the Democrats promise a luxurious life on the public dole.

What's the Wall Street Journal promising them?

Oh yeah -- changing the law to make it easier to bring in H2B workers to replace American workers so that American corporations have an easier time competing against foreign challengers.

Sounds like corporations are due some cash-money Protection by the government, but it would be "anti-capitalist" to similarly change immigration laws to protect American workers.

Gee -- I wonder why the Establishment lost any kind of control over its onetime base.

Read more here.

Peggy writes,

Nothing in their lives will get worse. The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street--that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending--because nobody cares about them enough to stop it.

The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them “xenophobic,” “narrow-minded,” “racist.” The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called “humanist,” “compassionate,” and “hero of human rights.”
...
The larger point is that this is something we are seeing all over, the top detaching itself from the bottom, feeling little loyalty to it or affiliation with it. It is a theme I see working its way throughout the West’s power centers. At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signalling.
...
From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.

Read more here.

Free speech under attack

At Chicago Boyz David Foster writes,

Free speech…free expression generally…is under attack in America and throughout the Western world to a degree not seen in a long time. I think there are seven specific phenomena, incarnated in seven (partially-overlapping) categories of people, which are largely driving this attack, to wit:

Read the seven categories here.

Latinophobes

I guess I can't be accused of being a Latinophobe, since I am moving to New Mexico this weekend.

What makes you tick?

Are you powered by grace, or by greed and evil? What do you believe about God? When you look ahead, can you see light?

Bering Land Bridge fossils show a lifeless area until long after humans hit the Americas.

Scientists now think

The first Americans were maritime peoples who came across the ocean rather than plodding across the land.

Annalee Newitz writes in ars technica that it is time to scrap the idea that humans arrived in the Americas by land bridge. Read why here.

Is it easy for you to say no?

How often do you say no? Shauna Niequist writes at A Holy Experience,

I don’t know a way to remake anything without first taking down the existing structures, and that’s what no does—it puts the brakes on your screaming-fast life and gives you a chance to stop and inspect just exactly what you’ve created for yourself, as difficult as that might be.

...I hovered endlessly after I said it—Was that okay? Are we okay? Because I love you—you know I love you, right? We’re okay?

But like anything you learn, it gets easier over time. You begin to build up muscle memory for what it feels like to say exactly what you feel, what you need, what your limitations are.

And a very interesting thing begins to happen: some people peer into your face with fascination—I want some of that, essentially, is what they’re saying. Your honesty and freedom is giving them the permission to be honest and free as well.

...Draw close to people who honor your no, who cheer you on for telling the truth, who value your growth more than they value their own needs getting met or their own pathologies celebrated.

Our little Cooking Club—my day-to-day lifeline best people—we’re cheering each other on along this journey, and it makes all the difference.

We talk every day, usually many times a day, and our constant refrain sounds like this: what can you lay down? How can we make this simpler? Are you getting enough rest? Can I take your kids for a couple hours?

Instead of competing for who’s busier or who’s more tired, who’s keeping more balls in the air, we’re constantly looking for ways to help each other’s lives get lighter, easier to carry, closer to the heart of what we love, less clogged with expectations and unnecessary tasks.

...But over time, when you rebuild a life that’s the right size and dimension and weight, full of the things you’re called to, emptied of the rest, then you do get to live some yes again.

But for a while, no is what gets you there.

Read more here.

Are Trump and Hillary both dishonest? Whose lies are more consequential?

What the two candidates have in common is that both tell lies of self-aggrandizement. Donald Trump is staggeringly boastful while Hillary loves to buff her resume, whether she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary (who gained fame after she was born) or landed under sniper fire in Bosnia (when all was peaceful at the airport).

...Where Hillary beats Trump, though, is that she tells not just self-aggrandizing lies but consequential lies. Hillary hid Watergate information in the 1970s and lied about it. Hillary committed financial fraud in the 1980s and lied about it. Hillary hid legal documents in the 1980s and lied about it. Hillary knew all about Bill’s trouser problem and forthrightly lied to America about it throughout the 1990s. Hillary engaged in Travelgate in the 1990s and lied about it.

Today, no one can keep up with the lies Hillary has told about her email system and the national security documents she exposed to enemies. Hillary also lied about what happened in Benghazi and then lied about her lies.

Looked at this way, it’s apparent that Hillary’s are substantive lies that go to national security, national policy, fraud, criminal law, etc. They are meaningful lies. They’re not just vain lies that say, “Aren’t I wonderful?” Instead, they are lies that change national policy, get people killed, defraud people, and enable Hillary and those around her to avoid prosecution for actual crimes.

...I’ll point out that Hillary too is on every side of every issue except for three, to which she’s remained true her entire career: She wants to destroy the Second Amendment; she wants unlimited abortion; and she believes that, no matter the question, government is the answer.

Read more here.

Victim of Media Rape

Ann Coulter writes today,

Even having predicted that the media's attacks on Trump would be unprecedented, I'm still amazed. Every single news outlet is dedicated to hysterically denouncing Trump, every minute of every day, while cooing at Hillary.

Everything Hillary has ever touched has failed, been engulfed in scandal, resulted in massive investigations, litigation, financial ruin, prison or death. The final stage of any Hillary enterprise is a grand announcement that Hillary did not technically break the law. Or no one can prove she did. Or, even if she did, no one ever gets prosecuted for it.

She's prone to coughing fits and lapses of memory in the middle of speeches, and falls down all the time. But that's not nearly as important as the media's manufactured story about Trump throwing a baby out of a rally!

Trump is supposed to be joined at the hip to David Duke based on not "disavowing" him with sufficient ferocity the 17th time he was asked about this person he's never met, never mentioned and didn't invite to speak at his convention.

Hillary invited the mother of violent cop-hating criminal Mike Brown to speak at her convention, and the Democratic platform expressly endorses the anti-police Black Lives Matter -- even as these celebrated cop haters inspire the mass slaughter of police officers across the country, in New York City, Dallas and Baton Rouge.

...The main story this week: The media's psychotic claim that Trump called for Hillary's assassination.

Trump said: "Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

Hmmm. What could Second Amendment people "do"? One thing they could do is what they did do -- in 1994. That was the year gun rights supporters voted out dozens of Democrats who voted wrong on guns, ushering in the first Republican Congress in 40 years.

No one, not even Joe McCarthy, has ever faced this level of obsessive hatred from our constitutionally protected guardians of liberty in the press. Anyone else would be chewed up and spit out after one minute of such relentless attacks.

But sissy conservatives who have never faced one minute of press hostility blame the victim, saying it's Trump's fault for giving the media openings to twist his words.

...There's no strategy for overcoming this level of media hostility. Trump has made some mistakes during this campaign, but he hasn't done anything wrong for months now. He could say "yes," and the media would change the question to, "Are you a child molester?"

Read more here.

Crony Criminals

Ace of Spades headlines this report:

Crony Criminals: Department of Justice Blocked Any FBI Inquiry Into Clinton Foundation

CNN reports,

The Clinton Foundation was not part of the recent investigation into her private server; it was separate. The FBI went to Justice Department earlier this year asking for it to open a case into the foundation, but the public integrity unit declined. The Justice Department had looked into whether it should open a case on the foundation a year prior and found it didn't have sufficient evidence to do so.

Read more here.

Back to Ace:

If Trump breaks the law, he'll be hounded, pressured into appointing and Independent Prosecutor --

Remember those? We had them under Republican presidents. It's where the President has to appoint someone from outside his coterie of cronies to investigate himself or his cronies. We don't have those under Democrat presidents, who prefer having their own cronies "investigate" them.

-- and then impeached and kicked out of office.

It will, indeed, be a black eye for the GOP.

But it will be a victory for the Rule of Law and a vindication of the American Republican System of Government.

And what happens when Hillary similarly breaks the law, then has her crony Loretta Lynch say "no controlling legal authority," and completely gets away with it?

Which outcome sounds worse to you? Which will be more corrosive to America itself -- the rule of law triumphant, or the rule of law humiliated, stripped of its clothes, and raped on the floor?

We are literally witnessing the end of the Republic itself, and yet people prefer to dwell on smaller things (maybe because smaller things are comforting; if you dwell on small things, you can convince yourself nothing major is amiss) and just shrug at the end of the Republic.

By the way: CNN buried the lede at the end of their story. Drudge had to elevate it to the actual headline news it is.

So, hey. Let's all coronate queen Hillary and her united media, federal bureaucracy, Supreme Court, and permanent Clinton-Industrial Complex.

There's nothing at all wrong with power with no checks whatsoever -- that's Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution, isn't it?

Treason never prospers, for if it prospers, then none dare call it treason.

Let's just sit back and watch some treason prospering.

Read more here.

Marines, turn off your iPhone and dig yourself a foxhole.

General Robert Neller

Marines, turn off your iPhone and dig yourself a foxhole. That’s the Commandant’s message to young Marines, based on embarrassing experiences in recent exercises. As cheap drones and other surveillance technologies spread worldwide, said Gen. Robert Neller, US forces must re-learn how to hide — both physically and electronically — from increasingly tech-savvy adversaries.

Read more here.

A reckless president could...

Bookworm has written another fabulous piece.

The Hillary supporters amongst whom I live are thrilled to pieces with the report that 50 GOP “national security experts” have signed a letter calling Trump potentially “the most reckless president in American history.” I certainly understand their concern about putting reckless people in charge of America’s national security. Just think of all the damage a reckless person could do:

A reckless president could deny that radical Islamists are waging war against us and, as part and parcel of that denial, scrub Islam from all national security guidelines. Oh, wait! Both Hillary, during her State tenure, and Obama have already done that.

A reckless president could begin a war without Congress’s approval to kill a national leader who is no longer a threat to America’s interests, destabilizing the region so severely that it becomes a haven for the worst kind of anti-Western terrorists. Oh, silly me! Hillary and Obama have already done that too.

A reckless president could refuse to give proper security to consulates in dangerous regions and then, when danger appears, refuse to send aid and lie about everything after the fact, ending up with the selfish insistence that, once people are dead, it no longer makes a difference what she did. I’m talking to you, Hillary.

A reckless president could withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq without leaving a force behind to secure a hard-won victory, allowing Iraq to become completely destabilized and turning it into another haven for the worst kind of anti-Western terrorists. Oh! Don’t tell me — Obama and Hillary already did that, didn’t they?

A reckless president could invite tens of thousands of people from a Middle Eastern region rife with terrorism to enter the United States, despite acknowledging that America currently has no way to vet them for terrorist ties nor is it making any effort to fulfill the core government obligation of protecting against infectious diseases. I did it again, didn’t I? Obama already did that, didn’t he? And Hillary promises to continue that course of action, right?

Read much more here.

A dramatic moment in the life of the nation

Do you remember what happened on this date in 1974? President Nixon resigned. Here is the Washington Post account of the day.

If Hillary Clinton is elected in November, will she be faced with a similar choice? Not if the media continues to give her pass after pass.

A life-long advocate for women and children?

Alana Goodman writes in Mailonline,

A child rape victim says she cannot forgive Hillary Clinton for defending her rapist in court 40 years ago, saying the Democratic presidential candidate attacked her credibility despite knowing that her assailant was guilty – and later laughed about it in a taped interview.
Kathy Shelton was just 12 years old when a 41-year-old drifter raped her on the side of a desolate Arkansas road in 1975.
Now, four decades later, she has agreed to be named and pictured for the first time in this Daily Mail Online exclusive because she is furious that her rapist's defense attorney - Hillary Clinton - has been portraying herself as a lifelong advocate of women and girls on the campaign trail.

'It's put a lot of anger back in me,' said Shelton, now 54, in an exclusive interview at her Springdale, Arkansas, home in August. 'Every time I see [Clinton] on TV I just want to reach in there and grab her, but I can't do that.'
In 1975, Clinton served as the defense lawyer for Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year-old factory worker accused of raping Shelton after luring her to his car.
Taylor pleaded down to 'unlawful fondling of a minor' and served less than a year in prison after Clinton was able to block the admission of forensic evidence that linked her client to the crime.
In a lengthy interview with the Daily Mail Online, Shelton said Clinton is 'lying' when she claims to be a lifelong defender of women and girls.
Shelton said Clinton accused her during the case of 'seeking out older men', and demanded that the 12-year-old undergo a grueling court-ordered psychiatric examination to determine whether she was 'mentally unstable'.
'I don't think [Clinton's] for women or girls. I think she's lying, I think she said anything she can to get in the campaign and win,' Shelton said. 'If she was [an advocate for women and children], she wouldn't have done that to me at 12 years old.'
While Shelton gave an anonymous interview to the Daily Beast in 2014, she said wants to start speaking out publicly, in part because 'I think a lot of people would look at [Clinton] in a different way' after hearing her story directly.
'I want to speak to the world. Out there at the White House, so everyone can hear me,' said Shelton. 'That's always been my thing since the anger's built up. I want to speak out like [Clinton] does, and let the whole world hear it.'
For decades, Shelton said she had no idea that Clinton was the same woman as the lawyer who defended her rapist in 1975.
During the case, Clinton accused the 12-year-old of 'seek[ing] out older men' and 'engag[ing] in fantasizing' in court affidavits, and later laughed while discussing aspects of the case in a recently-unearthed audiotape from the 1980s.
On the audiotape, Clinton indicated that she believed Taylor, her client, was guilty, saying that his ability to pass a lie detector test 'forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs'.

...Shelton said she was physically beaten during the attack.
'I can't cuss, but [Taylor] was calling me the 'b' word, and [saying] 'You like it, you know it',' said Shelton. 'Slapping me and hitting me with his fist.'

...Shelton recounted the brutal assault that she said left her with severe internal and external injuries. She said she was knocked into a coma, and later required stitches in her genital area.
'When I came out of the coma, I had several stitches down there. They tore me up bad,' she said. 'The doctors said there was a 99 percent chance I couldn't have kids. I have been with a couple men after that, it took me a long time to grow there. But I never had any kids.'

Read much more here.

A climate change quiz

I highly recommend you go to Manhattan Infidel immediately and take the climate change quiz. It's a combination of true or false, multiple choice, and more than a little tongue-in-cheek. You won't be sorry. Good luck!

"A steady diet of Democrat-party campaign material."

The latest brilliant analysis from Bookworm:

Up until 2008, although the media was already reliably Leftist, it still kept up the pretense that it was objective. In every election year, it interspersed its cheerleading for the Democrat candidate and put-downs for the Republican candidate with occasional stories that praised the Republican with faint damns, and that damned the Democrat with faint praise. In that far distant time, journalists still spoke about reporting as if their profession required them to relay facts instead of spinning them.

Everything changed in 2008. With the first black Democrat candidate for president, the Leftist collective that is the American media felt that it had a moral imperative to ensure that Obama won. It began the righteous charge, therefore, by destroying Hillary during the primaries (clearly, a “first sort of black president” trumped a “first sort of woman president”).

Then, having performed that job, the media turned its collective wrath on McCain, even while singing endless paeans to the wonder that was Obama, the magic negro, the racial healer, the smartest person in every room, and the guy with the great crease in his pants. The media was so committed to its mission that it ignored entirely basic reporting obligations, such as determining whether Obama’s academic record supported his much-vaunted intellect; whether his professional career suggested a competent man; whether his Christian faith comported with core Christian doctrine or was just a weekly anti-American grievance gathering; and whether his associations throughout his life were of the type (anti-American, anti-semitic, anti-white, etc.) that might give ordinary voters some concern.

Indeed, rather than reporting on Obama, the media did the opposite: anyone who did good, old-fashioned legwork to learn more about the man who wanted to take the helm in America was a racist. If you wished to avoid that repellant label, you took Obama at face value, reserving your reportorial skills for destroying Sarah Palin (whose life, unlike Obama’s, was already an open book).

Once Obama became president, it was pretty obvious that the media had oversold him. He wasn’t a racial healer, he wasn’t the smartest man in the room, he wasn’t a competent manager, he wasn’t a committed Christian, and he was still palling around with anti-American activists, although his palling around now took him all over the world. He elevated Muslim and illegal immigrant concerns over American rights, was (and is) hostile to the Constitution, hated Israel, lied like a rug about Obamacare, and generally was at his best only when he was slow jammin’ on late night talk shows. Everything else . . . meh, not so much.

In 2012, the media did exactly what it had done in 2008. It reported positively on Obama, and negatively on every Republican during the primaries and on Mitt Romney after the primaries. However, possibly nervous about a wholesale repeat of its 2008 campaign for Obama, the media still practice a little bit of reportage that included damning Obama with faint praise, and praising Romney with faint damns. For the most part, though, the media made it clear which candidate it thought should win.

I mistakenly believed in 2012 that the American people, educated by the chasm between the Obama promise and the Obama practice, would have been put wise to the fact that they were not getting actual news (that is, “just the facts”) but were instead on the receiving end of a steady diet of Democrat-party campaign material. Given how bad things were for Democrat players and politics in 2012, I therefore assumed that a savvy public would understand the propaganda and vote Obama out of office. I erred.

While I may have erred in 2012, the media learned its lesson — it can say anything, and it can hide anything, and the uninformed will follow its lead . . . sometimes even as that same credulous public mumbles despairingly that the media is no longer publishing actual, you know, news.

...Of course, having sinned twice and been rewarded, the media is now sinning with over-the-top gusto. No more feeble attempts at even-handedness. Reporters are openly feeding at the Jon Stewart trough. There are no MSM stories about Trump’s success as a businessman, about the people loyal to and respectful of him, about the generous or moral stands he’s taken over the years, or about the fact that his business success shows that he’s actually rather risk-averse, rather than the opposite. Every news report first claims that everything he says is a lie, only to back off from those claims days later, in small print or lost links.

Instead, the media is in a shark-feeding frenzy, with Trump as the chum. Having propped him up during the primaries (“Let’s promote the most unelectable primary candidate for the Republican party”), reporters are going in for the kill. Moreover, they’re going in for the kill with shoddy, dishonest reporting, and they refuse to back down even when proven to have lied. For them, every story about Trump is a successful example of the “Big Lie.”

Meanwhile, when it comes to Hillary, the media is happy to let her vanish for 246 days. They’re happy to report her press releases as news. They’re happy to downplay the fact that she proved to be the greatest national security risk in American history. They’re happy to ignore the fact that she sold out America to fund herself and her husband. They ignore the lies, the physical problems, the mental weirdness, the corruption, the repeated job failures, and all the other stuff that should be on the front page of every paper along with the reporting on Trump.

...There’s something very wrong with Hillary and Scott Adams is right to say that the American people should demand to see her health records (and Trump’s too, for that matter).

Honestly, I’m at the point where I’m going to vote for Trump just as an act of hostility to the American media.

Read more here.

Can the government run the economy?

Someone is lying

Raphael Ahren and Eric Cortelleswsa report at The Times of Israel,

Israel on Friday firmly rejected US President Barack Obama’s claim that its officials now support last year’s nuclear deal with Iran. Far from accepting Obama’s assertion, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s stance had not changed, while the Israeli Defense Ministry compared the accord to the Munich Agreement signed by the European powers with Nazi Germany in 1938.

Obama said Thursday that Israeli defense officials are now behind the deal signed by world powers and Iran, and that they recognize the efficacy of the accord.

Read more here.

ISIS strikes again in Belgium

Julian Robinson and Chris Summers report for Mailonline,

ISIS claims responsibility for machete attack on two Belgian policewomen by Algerian who shouted 'Allahu Akbar' before being shot dead by officers.
Man wielding machete shouted 'Allahu Akbar' as he attacked officers.
Two Belgian policewomen were injured by the Algerian assailant, 33.
A third officer then shot the attacker who later died from his injuries.
ISIS has claimed one of its 'soldiers' carried out the savage attack.
ISIS has claimed responsibility for a machete attack on two Belgian policewomen carried out by an Algerian who shouted 'Allahu Akbar' before being shot dead by officers.

The 33-year-old went on the rampage with a knife outside a police station in Charleroi, south of Brussels yesterday, before he was shot by a third officer.

Read more here.

Hillary discussed Iranian scientist on her emails. He's now been hanged by Iran.

Jacqueline Klimas reports at the Washington Examiner,

Hillary Clinton recklessly discussed, in emails hosted on her private server, an Iranian nuclear scientist who was executed by Iran for treason, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Sunday.

"I'm not going to comment on what he may or may not have done for the United States government, but in the emails that were on Hillary Clinton's private server, there were conversations among her senior advisors about this gentleman," he said on "Face the Nation." Cotton was speaking about Shahram Amiri, who gave information to the U.S. about Iran's nuclear program.

The senator said this lapse proves she is not capable of keeping the country safe.

"That goes to show just how reckless and careless her decision was to put that kind of highly classified information on a private server. And I think her judgment is not suited to keep this country safe," he said.

The revelation could cause further political damage to Clinton, who was already on the defensive Sunday after commenting oddly last week that she had "short-circuited" in a statement related to her honesty about the email scandal.

Republican nominee Donald Trump seized on the statement to question her mental stability.

Iran confirmed on Sunday that Amiri had been hanged for treason. He was convicted of spying charges in a death sentence case that was upheld on appeal, according to the Associated Press.

"This person who had access to the country's secret and classified information had been linked to our hostile and No. 1 enemy, America, the Great Satan" a spokesman for the Iranian judiciary said. "He provided the enemy with vital and secret information of the country."

His body was returned to his mother with rope marks around the neck.

Hold on!

Yesterday my son Greg and his brother joined their two stepbrothers for a quick fishing trip to Steamboat Springs. I will be moving to New Mexico with them this weekend, so blogging may be lighter than usual.

More on Hillary's health issues

Here is a website that is trying to figure out Hillary's health issues. If the mainstream media won't look into it, you can be sure that there will be people on the internet who will do the media's job for them.
I thought this You Tube video was interesting. She starts to freeze up, and the black man who intervenes tells her to "keep talking," and gets the Secret Service men out of the way. He is always near her, and carries an Auto-Injector Syringe for the Anti-Seizure Drug Diazepam.

Hillary Clinton's health should be an issue in this campaign

This photo made the rounds of the internet yesterday. I wanted to find out when and where it was taken. After going to Reuters, which took the photo, and several other sites that had the photo, I finally found this by Patrick Howley at Breitbart:

Reuters and Getty photographs captured Hillary Clinton, 68, struggling to make it up the stairs, either as a result of her fragile body or perhaps because her well-documented brain injuries make it harder for her to transport herself through daily life activities. The photos gained wide circulation on the Internet Sunday. The photos were taken in February as Clinton was campaigning in South Carolina.

Breitbart News has extensively reported on Clinton’s various health problems, including what could be a lingering brain condition that appeared after she suffered a blood cot.

Donald Trump is hammering Clinton for “short-circuiting” when she had to answer questions about her private email scandal, which she clearly did not answer truthfully.

Breitbart’s Alex Swoyer reported in January:

Clinton’s disappearance from the debate stage last month left people speculating that the former First Lady took a long bathroom break, but now a law-enforcement source with inside connections is alleging that Clinton was missing from the stage due to health issues stemming from a previous brain injury.

These long-lasting symptoms stemming from a concussion and blood clot, according to a neurologist, suggest Clinton is suffering from post-concussion syndrome, which can severely impact her cognitive abilities.

All that said, however, Clinton’s campaign maintained to Breitbart News that she is in good health and can serve as President of the United States.

Clinton previously fell on the stairs in 2011:

She also fell in 2009 on the way to a White House meeting.

The new glossy ISIS magazine

Oregon Muse reports at Ace of Spades,

Thanks to Acting President Obama's feckless, bumbling, "leading from behind" foreign policy, ISIS has become established enough so that it is able to produce a slick, glossy monthly magazine *in English* called 'Dabiq', named after the Syrian city that, according to Islamic eschatology, will be the site of the final battle between Christian and Muslim armies.

The Clarion Project has made all 15 issues available from this page.

So much for those 'COEXIST' bumper stickers. Our choices are, according to ISIS: conversion to Islam, dhimmitude under shari'ah law, or a temporary pause before one or the other. Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer couldn't have said it better.

Women and children?

CDR M reports at Ace of Spades,

Women and children my ass. Pew Survey: 73% of Europe's refugees in 2015 were men.

I haven't found data yet for refugees entering the United States that break down the male female ratio but I did find this regarding folks coming across from the south. You see the same imbalance. In FY2015, 68% of unaccompanied children were males. In fact for the last four years it has been 77%, 73%, 66%, and 68%.

Here you can see by state the breakdown of where all refugees are being relocated. CA is leading the charge.

Explaining the Left

At One Cosmos Gagdad Bob makes many brilliant points to help us understand those who adhere to a leftist point of view.

Obama and Clinton prove the old adage that lying is the essential quality -- for if you're good at lying, then brother, you're good at everything. Thus, Obama's presidency has been a stunning success, and Clinton is the most qualified candidate for president ever.
Churchill once remarked that it is sometimes necessary for truth to be protected by a bodyguard of lies. In the case of the left it's the other way around: their lies are protected and propagated by a bodyguard of self-styled "truth tellers," AKA the media.

Think about that: our culture has developed a systematic and pervasive megaphone for the propagation of liberal lies, under the guise of being the necessary institution for an informed citizenry. It pretends to be our cognitive immune system on a seek-and-destroy mission against falsehood, when it is really an autoimmune disorder that attacks truth.

A commenter named maineman adds,

I think Obama has kind of upped the ante when it comes to publically displayed deviance, formerly understood as mental illness. When you congratulate yourself while you lie through your teeth, relish the con like Gollum with his precious, give shout-outs to your comrades while talking about the slaughter of innocents, light up the White House in celebration of sodomy, talk about the creation of new life as a punishment, and do something like that almost every time you are in public, you're pretty clearly in Rasputin territory.

And the thing that points to the demonic is the way it normalizes lawlessness and psychopathy and is profoundly disorienting for anyone without enough grounding in reality to want to throw up when they see or hear it.

Long time commenter Julie adds,

Not to mention all the racial healing. Every time he lectures whitey because some black thug got hurt or was mistreated, he pours more venom into the wounds between the races. Ironically, if he had any decency at all he really could have brought about an era of racial healing. He made himself out to be a "father figure" to all the Trayvons in the country; a true father would have told them that being a Trayvon or a Michael Brown is no way to live.

Re. Mrs. Trump, they are trying so hard to manufacture outrage amongst conservatives. This came out a year ago, but they just have to bring it back.

If she were doing those kind of photoshoots today, of course that would be a problem - as much in what it says about a man if his wife does that kind of thing after they're married as anything. But sixteen years ago, and we're supposed to be outraged? Meh. People are capable of change. I'd still rather have her as 1st lady than Bill. At least she didn't rape anyone.

...Incidentally, that's a tactic the left loves to trot out: calling out someone for doing things they think conservatives will get upset about, but which they themselves would celebrate in anyone on their side. When Lena Dunham or Amy Whassername does it, she's so brave. Melania? What a whore! In a bad way! We know a slut when we see one!! Slut shaming is totally appropriate when we do it!!!

Gagdad Bob adds,

Then again, Obama's pathology is so perfectly mirrored by the media and entertainment industries, that it is as if there is a seamless unity between the self-image and its reflection in the world. This would explain how and why he is always so mocking and contemptuous of those who disagree with him, i.e., who fail to mirror him. (In this context, contempt is a defense mechanism, simply the other side of the (self) idealization.)

The specific condition is called Delusional Disorder of the Grandiose subtype, which involves "delusions of inflated worth, power, knowledge, identity, or special relationship to a deity or famous person." Interesting how he is going to have so many famous low-life celebrities and rappers at his birthday party. Must make him feel special.

I would love to conduct a thorough evaluation of him. Otherwise it's difficult to nail down the diagnosis.

...no one here believes Trump is some sort of ideal candidate, only that the alternative is infinitely worse. Yes, there is risk involved with Trump. Conversely, there is no risk with Clinton, rather, certainty that she will be a disaster, especially vis-a-vis the Supreme Court. I don't know about the rest, but that is my gravest concern, as it will fundamentally reshape the nation for decades.

Julie added,

Yup. There is plenty to dislike about Trump, and who knows how much we can trust him? But Hillary is quite trustworthy: we can trust that she will lie, cheat, sell us out to our enemies, backstab, weaken our position in the world, and make all but her closest "friends" miserable for the foreseeable future. America and the world will be far more dangerous than they are even now, and our children's futures will be bleak indeed.

Bob added,

...Moral maturity involves the recognition that we must sometimes choose the lesser of two evils. Doing so is good, even though it doesn't change the evil into a good.

The classic case is WW2, when we allied with one of the most vicious monsters in history in order to defeat the other monster.

...the Democrats have become the party of the super wealthy and the low IQ hordes. The former don't
have to eat what the left serves, while the latter are promised better government food in the future.

Read much more here.